With her almost supernaturally clear and agile soprano, Emma Kirkby has enchanted audiences ever since she first appeared on the Early Music scene in the 1970s. And as the art of historically informed performance has become more and more widely appreciated, so has her style of singing, to the extent that she in 2007 was included in a listing of ‘the 20 greatest sopranos ever’ made by the BBC Music Magazine. Throughout her career, Emma Kirkby has made a large number of recordings of a wide range of music. Released on the occasion of her 60th birthday, the present collection celebrates her collaboration with BIS, which has resulted in ten discs to date.

Among Handel's vocal works - from the early, operatic solo cantatas to the full-blown operas and the oratorios of his London years - the Nine German Arias hold a special place. Possibly composed around the time that the composer made a final journey to Germany to take leave of his ailing mother, they were Handel's last settings of texts in his native language. It seems likely that these circumstances contributed to the intimate character of these highly personal works, in combination with the texts themselves. Barthold Heinrich Brockes' poems point ahead towards the Enlightenment, establishing as their setting a harmonically organised world, in which benevolent Nature is the prime example of God's bounty.

For anyone who ever wondered what Pachelbel was up to when he wasn't writing his Canon in D, this CD offers some lovely answers. (He was also playing the organ and teaching, and one of his students was Johann Sebastian Bach, in whose works it's possible to detect Pachelbel's influence.) While there is nothing as immediately catchy as the Canon, the sacred and secular arias and vocal concertos recorded here reveal a composer with a gift for attractive vocal writing and inventive instrumental accompaniments.

Handel’s music from his early years, in Hamburg and Italy, has a remarkably sure touch, coupled with an exuberant spirit which he seldom matched again.
The Nine German Arias are to texts by Brockes who, preparing a later edition, praised Handel for ‘[setting] them to music in a very special way’. Emma Kirkby expresses with radiant ease and simplicity the confident Pietistic message which runs through them, of God’s goodness reflected in the beauties of nature.

Agrippina is brilliant, early Handel. Composed when he was just twenty-four, it was his first big hit in the theatre. It’s full of his fresh, exuberantly inventive music and sets one of the finest librettos Handel worked with. This beautiful production, with an elegant and colorful staging, was recorded at the exquisite Rococo palace theatre in Schwetzingen, built in 1752.

Emma Kirkby always has been an excellent Handel singer, from her two 1985 recordings–Italian Cantatas with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (L'Oiseau Lyre) and German Arias with Charles Medlam and the London Baroque (EMI)–and 1987's Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, again with the London Baroque (Harmonia Mundi) to this new, exemplary program of Latin motets. Kirkby retains a remarkably youthful sound, exhibiting all of her admired agility and intonational accuracy, but with more richness in the lower register than in her younger days.

London Baroque, one of our best pre-classical ensembles, has chosen an all-Marais programme for its debut on gramophone records. Both works come from a collection published in 1723 containing unusually extended pieces in a style often removed from that of Marais's Pièces de violes. The most elaborate of them is La gamme which, as its name suggests, relies both on the ascending and descending levels of the scale for its invention.

Rameau’s secular chamber cantatas are early works, written before he got his longed-for chance to compose for the stage. While they are clearly the works of a talented and skilled artist, it has to be admitted that they only hint at the powerful personality and individuality of the operas. Yet even that is something to be valued from someone like Rameau, and we can be glad that London Baroque have made them the subject of one of their relatively rare excursions into French repertoire.

London Baroque offers another installment in its ongoing European Trio Sonata series, this time devoted to 18th-century Italy; as with the ensemble’s previous efforts the program features generally excellent performances of lesser-known repertoire. Ten years ago I reviewed a similar 18th-century Italian program by this same group titled “Stravaganze Napoletane”, also on BIS, and was generally impressed with the performances–except for one piece: Domenico Gallo’s Sonata No. 1 in G major.

This exciting programme is presented by Emma Kirkby and London Baroque, household names in the sphere of 'early music', and certainly no new-comers to th works of Handel. Indeed, when they last joined forces in a Handel programme the website MusicWeb International called the performances ones that 'make one wish that all Handel music making could be of this order', while the reviewer in BBC Music Magazine wrote 'Ive seldom been as moved by a recording, both music and performance'.

BIS have come up with that seasonal rarity: the intelligent, considered and beautifully presented Christmas album. Emma Kirkby's pure tone, keen intelligence and utterly natural musicality need no introduction - she has, after all, been delighting us all for decades now. No admirer of either baroque music or Emma Kirkby will want to miss this impeccably programmed disc. The short Böddecker piece acts as a perfect warm-up. It is gentle and pure - the ideal vehicle for Kirkby's voice. Listening to the Cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti takes us to another, altogether more exalted world.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.

This recording of Monteverdi's retelling of the Orpheus legend may not be as fine overall as John Eliot Gardiner's, but it has much to recommend it. Nigel Rogers was the first great modern Monteverdi tenor: he made this record after his prime, but his virtuoso passage-work and stylish ornaments should be required listening for every student of the role. The cast, chorus, and orchestra give solid, if occasionally reserved, performances (though Guillemette Laurens is a shrill Messenger). The best singing of the entire record is (perhaps unfortunately) at the beginning: Emma Kirkby's sweet voice, imaginative embellishment, and eloquent delivery as Music result in absolutely the best rendition of the Prologue on record.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.